Days After Orlando Attack, House G.O.P. Blocks Vote on Gay-Rights Amendment - - So much for solidarity

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/house-gop-blocks-vote-lgbt-rights-amendmentLess than three days after a popular gay club in Orlando became the site of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives blocked a vote on a proposal that would ensure federal contractors can’t discriminate against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identification. Hours earlier, a number of notable conservative figures had put on a good show of standing in solidarity with the L.G.B.T. community, making the rounds on cable news to stand up for the dozens of gay men and women who died in Sunday’s attack. On Tuesday night, however, it was back to business as usual as the House Rules Committee prevented the amendment from reaching the floor for a vote.

Stunning isn't it, did this Texas christian freak talk to the owner of the club?, "Pulse" being named after her brother who died of Aids, the right wing nut disease made to rid society of the 'undesirables', because Omar was "one of those" closeted republicans who cruise grindr, other republicans can relate to hiding their true sexuality, so now the bar was not a gay bar in the feeble mind of any republicans because Omar, "the straight married, to a women, man with child" would never enter a real gay bar? How much more delusional, twisted, control and power hungry can they be

In the immediate aftermath of the Orlando shooting, many Republicans leaders offered their thoughts, prayers, and sympathies to the victims, but neglected to mention that the gay community had been targeted. One of those Republicans has since taken the step of actually denying that the gay community was targeted — and then he blocked a bill that would have protected them from discrimination.

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX). As chairman of the House Rules Committee, he has the power to control which amendments can advance. This week, he was faced with another of Maloney’s amendments, attached to a defense spending bill making its way to the House floor. Before the committee’s meeting on Tuesday, Daniel Newhauser of the National Journal asked Sessions what impact the Orlando shooting would have on how the amendment proceeds. Sessions rejected the idea that it would have any impact, openly denying that Pulse was a gay nightclub

The three words that best describe the private security business these days are “racism”, “corruption”, and “profits”. Wackenhut, the largest private security provider to the Federal govt and the military outside of Iraq, would appear to be awash in all three.

Wackenhut, which has ties to the GOP and the Bush Administration that go almost as deep as Halliburton’s, is currently under investigation:

In Britain, Wackenhut’s parent company, Group 4 Securicor, is the subject of an undercover BBC investigation into its handling of a contract to monitor sex offenders “revealing rapists, killers, and pedophiles left unmonitored as a result of faulty equipment and poor work practices.” In South Africa, Wackenhut – the largest employer on the continent with 65,000 employees – “has been investigated and sued for things like reserving ‘white only’ toilets; advising employees to consider lesser positions because of pregnancy; perpetuating hostile work environments, and overall poor pay and working conditions.”

None of this has kept either the Bush DOE or the Army from handing new contracts to Wackenhut and G4S, most of which are no-bid give-aways. As when Halliburton is involved, Wackenhut’s long history of human rights violations, violations of labor laws, incompetence, graft, fraud, and witness/whistleblower intimidation means nothing because it has ties to Bush.

The SEIU is trying to help guards form a union to protect them from the corporation’s misuse and abuse of its employees and to bring minimum standards of accountability to a company that hasn’t yet had to learn the meaning of the word. According to SEIU’s Kawana Lloyd (via email), despite all this skullduggery, Wackenhut is still guarding Army bases, nuclear weapons facilities, and nuclear plants

It’s all part of the Bush Administration’s privatization initiative.

The controversy began in 2003, when the United States Congress authorized the Department of Defense to hire private security officers to replace Military Police and other uniformed personnel at more than 40 U.S. Army installations to compensate for the manpower demands of the Afghan and Iraq wars. The first round of these contracts—worth nearly $200 million per year—was awarded on a “sole-source” (no-bid) basis to two Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs), Alutiiq Security and Technology and Chenega, both with limited previous security experience. Alutiiq subcontracted work to Wackenhut, for which Wackenhut was eligible to receive an estimated $47 million per year.(emphasis added)

It’s a standard corporate shell-game undermining the laws requiring minority participation in Federal contracts by using dummy fronts and subsidiaries masquerading as the “prime” contractors

This sort of corruption is precisely what we’ve come to expect from Bush’s privatization mania as corporations use their political influence in place of merit to rip off the taxpayers, abuse employees, violate labor laws and human rights laws with impunity, and rake in massive unearned profits as its reward for cheating, stealing, and law-breaking. You will note that with the single exception of the GAO, NONE of the many investigations are emanating from the DOE, Labor, the Army or Homeland Security, all of which continue to hand out contracts to Wackenhut without bidding, oversight, or accountability. What Halliburton and KBR and Parsons are doing in Iraq, Wackenhut is doing right here under our very noses, and yet so far the mainstream press has taken little or no notice of them because there hasn’t been an Abramoff-type central figure to hang it all on.

The guards angry at shitty working conditions, low pay, inadequate training, substandard equipment, and lax, management-ordered security policies are the only ones trying to put a stop to Wackenhut’s executives’ criminal mismanagement and outright theft.